2015 National Book Awards: Fiction
The National Book Foundation unveiled the longlist for its fiction prize this morning.
Short story collections and epic novels will have to duke it out for the prize. The nominated books confront love, race, friendship, finance and family &mdash lost and found.
The finalists will be announced Oct. 14, and the winner will be announced Nov. 18.
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National Book Awards longlist: Fiction
"A Cure for Suicide" by Jesse Ball
Ball's imagination runs wild in his novel, centered on a man and a woman in a small village. The man is a "claimant," the woman is his "examiner." She takes daily notes on his dreams and his progress. As the novel unfolds, the secrets of the strange arrangement and the village itself are revealed.
"Refund: Stories" by Karen E. Bender
Bender's stories all dance around money, who has it and who doesn't. She skips from an 80-year-old swindler to reality television, investigating how money colors every human interaction.
"Did You Ever Have a Family" by Bill Clegg
Clegg's novel opens with the ultimate tragedy: A woman loses her entire family in one cruel sweep. Hailed as "daring" by NPR, the novel traces the aftermath as the characters find solace in unlikely places.
"The Turner House" by Angela Flournoy
The embattled neighborhoods of Detroit come to life in Flournoy's tale of a family house. The Turner House has sheltered the family for fifty years, and has seen 13 children grow and leave. When it's revealed that the house is only worth a tenth of its mortgage, the family must come together to decide its fate.
"Fates and Furies" by Lauren Groff
Though its title hints at a story of epic proportions, Groff centers her novel on a single marriage. She follows the union of Lotto and Mathilde for 24 years in what The New York Times called an "unabashedly ambitious novel."
"Fortune Smiles: Stories" by Adam Johnson
Johnson has been compared to the masters of daring fiction: George Saunders, David Mitchell, Kurt Vonnegut. In "Fortune Smiles," his six stories delve in love, loss, natural disasters and how technology is changing the way we interact.
"Welcome to Braggsville" by T. Geronimo Johnson
"Braggsville" follows D'aron Davenport, born and raised in the South, as he starts his freshman year at UC Berkeley. Johnson unleashes his razor-sharp satire as Davenport learns you can never escape where you're from.
NPR placed Johnson's novel in a constellation of literary legends, saying "great American writers whose names came to mind as I was reading 'Welcome to Braggsville': Tom Wolfe, Mark Twain, Toni Morrison, H.L. Mencken, Don DeLillo, David Foster Wallace, Norman Mailer and Ralph Ellison."
"Honeydew" by Edith Pearlman
Pearlman examines the small moments of everyday life in her award-winning stories. She writes about myriad characters, from a widowed pedicurist to a group of Somali women adjusting to life in a Boston suburb. The New York Times Book Review said the collection should cement Pearlman's reputation as "one of the most essential short story visionaries of our time."
"A Little Life" by Hanya Yanagihara
Yanagihara follows four classmates from a small Massachusetts college as they try make their way in New York City. Over the decades, their friendship and alliances shift and strain under the pressure of setbacks and successes. The New Yorker called it "a surprisingly subversive novel."
"Mislaid" by Nell Zink
Zink weaves a tangled web for her characters. In 1966, a college freshman has an affair with her professor — even though he is gay and she is a lesbian — and it kicks off a tragicomic series of events that will take another generation to unfold. Their children will be left to sort it out, after being raised apart for their whole lives.